Ice axe tip - replace your wrist loop with a lanyard

Ever wonder why some rope teams can speed up moderate snow terrain, while other teams may take two or three times as long to cover the same ground? There are many reasons for speed, but here’s one good way to shave unneeded micro-breaks that can really add up.

Scenario: Your rope team of four is on a snow climb, and is constantly zigzagging back and forth to find the easiest terrain and avoid the occasional crevasse. At each change of direction for each team member, the entire rope team needs to stop while one person at a time dutifully switches their ice axe wrist loop to their new uphill hand. Add thick gloves, wet webbing, cold fingers, and a host of other time suckers to the equation, and you have a rope team that is taking perhaps dozens of unnecessary 1 minute breaks (approx.) over the course of a climb.  Take a snow route with many changes of direction, like Mt. Rainier’s Disappointment Cleaver.  Here, if the route has 30 changes of direction, a four person rope team that takes an extra 4 minutes per direction change adds a stunning 2 HOURS to their ascent time.

Solution: Use a leash (or lanyard, if you like to call it that) attached to your harness for your ice axe, not a wrist loop. With nothing attached to your hand, you can instantly swap the axe to your uphill hand at every change in direction without breaking stride. 

While you could just use a simple 4 foot runner, here is a more refined system:  You need five feet or so of 4mm cord and a sewn short (1 foot) runner.  Tie one end of the cord directly to the head of your axe with a bowline.  Tie the other end through the sewn loop, with another bowline.  Use the sewn runner to girth hitch the leash to your harness.  If the going gets steep, remove the axe from your harness and use the runner as a wrist loop for piolet traction.  Wrap the extra cord a few times around the head of the axe to remove the slack.  Test the length of the cord, and trim a bit off if you need to.  Add a small butterfly knot about 1 foot from the head of the axe if you like, as a handy place to clip a biner for a quick axe-biner belay.

The diagram below is from the excellent book, The Mountaineering Handbook by Craig Connally (available in our Library at the Mazama Mountaineering Center)